X-factor Louis Walsh sparks new craze for hair transplants after showing his new thatch

X-factor mogul caused a stir when he got his locks in 2011

Louis Walsh arrives at the X Factor auditions, at Excel London (Photo: PA)

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Louis Walsh has sparked a craze for hair transplants – after showing off his new thatch.

The X Factor mogul caused a stir when he got his locks back in 2011 – and later admitted he had help from a surgeon.

He said at the time: “People have asked if me getting a hair transplant meant I was having some sort of a midlife crisis, but I wasn’t.

“And like Sharon Osbourne once said to me about her surgery, ‘It’s maintenance, Louis’ and she was right, that’s just what it is – maintenance.

“You have to keep yourself in good form, without doing anything too extreme.”

(Photo: PA)

With celebs such as Manchester United ace Wayne Rooney, The Hobbit star James Nesbitt and former Dancing On Ice judge Jason Gardiner all turning to hair transplant surgery to roll back the years and fix their bald spots, demand in Ireland has never been higher.

The good news is you can get the same celebrity-style results with The Hospital Group clinics in Dublin, Cork, Belfast and Galway without the €30,000 price tag Louis reportedly forked out.

And it’s not just Irish men who are queueing up for the revolutionary treatment – women suffering from baldness and wafer-thin locks are also opting for painless hair transplants.

We don't do this to our boss at work (Photo: getty)

Hair restoration expert Dr Craig Ziering has done more than 16,000 procedures in his 20-year career and developed his own techniques and equipment to achieve top-class results.

He revealed how patients will have a new full head of hair within 10 months.

Dr Ziering said: “Hair transplant surgery has come a long way since it was first developed and make no mistake about it, it really does change people’s lives.

“It’s not so much vanity as people trying to get their confidence back and I suppose the way to look at it is it’s reconstructive surgery because it’s replacing something you once had.

“When people lose their hair, and it’s both men and women equally, they often lose their sense of self with it so why not fix it?

“It goes much deeper than something superficial, it’s liberating.”

For as little as €6,000, depending on the extent of your hair loss, specialist surgeons can replace your missing tresses with one of two pain-free techniques.

Patients either opt for Strip Harvesting, where tissue is removed and then the individual hair follicles are dissected under a microscope, or Follicular Unit Extraction, where grafts are harvested individually.

Thankfully, both miracle treatments are undetectable and in less than a year patients have a beautiful head of hair again.

Dr Ziering revealed: “The results are pretty much permanent but obviously if you have the transplant when you’re young the hair may thin so you can get other therapies to prevent more loss.

Louis Walsh in 2007 (Photo: WENN)

“Everyone only has so much donor hair so the skill of the surgeon is paramount and that’s why it’s so important to pick a reputable clinic.

“The biggest thing to remember is you are not alone and losing your hair is nothing to be ashamed about. There are many conditions you can’t treat but this isn’t one of them, the results will look normal, the surgery is affordable and the earlier you start with intervention the better the results.”

Male Pattern Baldness, the most common form of hair loss in men, affects men as young as 17 and happens gradually in four key stages.

The first tell-tale sign is when the hairline starts to recede and over time, the recession becomes more and more noticeable.

At the same time, a bald spot might start appearing on the crown and the final stage of Male Pattern Hair Loss is when hair disappears completely from the crown and front of a man’s head – leaving a bald horseshoe shape which can cause a lot of distress.

In women, hair loss can be so gradual that sufferers don’t notice until half their hair has disappeared.

An average person sheds up to 150 hairs a day, a woman who notices her hair is thinning significantly is probably suffering from a more excessive hair loss. That usually means hair follicles aren’t regenerating hair strands that have fallen out, or the hair is just becoming thinner.

And while the balding may be genetic, there are other factors such as hormonal changes, anemia, stress or thyroid problems that might be to blame.

And unlike with men, a full medical examination and blood tests are often required for the proper diagnosis of female pattern hair loss – and the good news is that if certain medical causes can be identified and treated, female hair loss can in many cases be reversed.